The Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) said yesterday that ministerial initiatives undertaken in the troubled community of Baramita lack the “decisiveness and over-all coordination to redress the fundamental problems facing the community.”
The association, in a press release, said that the penetration of the community by external interests has decisively undermined the capacity of the village council to protect the rights of the indigenous community.
“A more comprehensive strategy under the tri-partite leadership of the broader indigenous community, the MOIA [the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples’ Affairs] and civil society is required to insulate the community from the malign influences which are fuelling a process of ethnocide,” the release said.
The press release by the association follows its recently released report in which it painted a horrifying picture of the Region One community, where the incidence of sexual and physical violence is so high among women and children that young girls are forced to walk with broken bottles in their bosoms as a form of protection.
However, the government, in response to the report, said that while it was aware of the many ills in the community, it has started an urgent intervention that has already seen a reduction in suicides and gang rapes. But Minister within the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples’ Affairs Valerie Garrido-Lowe admitted that there is still a high incidence of wounding as a direct result of alcohol abuse.
The GHRA report told the story of women and children being drunk in the middle of the day and of more than 70% of the population having marks of violence owing to the many wounding incidents in the community.
According to the press release, the intertwined weight of mining and a “dominant cult-like religious sect” constitute the most potent negative influences in the satellite community. It pointed out that such issues are difficult to confront as they attract less attention than exploitation, alcoholism, suicide and sexual violence. “Another under-reported dimension of the problem is the fact that both of these influences are dominated by mixed race members of the community while the majority of the Carib population live in ramshackle, dilapidated dwellings in isolated settlements,” the release said.
It added that the strength of economic and religious interests with a stake in maintaining the status quo in the community place the problem beyond resolution by civic organisations alone – indigenous or otherwise.
The association recommended that to effectively deal with the issues there is need for the backing of the State, exercising its responsibility to protect as set out in Article 2 of the International Labour Organisation Convention 169 on The Rights of Indigenous & Tribal Peoples. It said that responsibility to protect may be invoked to enforce a range of protective measures to address emergency/urgent actions; humanitarian interventions; restoring authority; protection of human rights; conflict resolution; suspending contracts; controlling access; and to promote integrity of the natural environment.
“Collective leadership should be exercised to protect against the tendency for individual agency interests displacing the needs of the intended beneficiaries. Most importantly, a collective intervention should involve the government, through relevant ministries, the national indigenous community, in particular other Carib-speaking communities, the National Toshaos Council and other relevant civil society. Equally important, ownership of the rehabilitative process should be progressively exercised by the Baramita community,” the release said.
The main recommendation of the GHRA report, which also covered other Amerindian communities, is that each community undertake a process of developing a community life plan for itself. It noted that such an exercise will assist the community develop a sense of itself and to assess what is compatible and not compatible with community-oriented, rather than individual-oriented development processes.
Moreover, it said such an exercise will assist the communities in arriving at a place where they can assess, among other things, what they want and do not want from mining and take the necessary policy and legal decisions to protect that vision. Without a framework of this nature, it added, communities remain vulnerable to a multiplicity of short-term development projects from a wide spectrum of uncoordinated agencies.
